Wednesday, June 17, 2015

R9 Fury X PCB analysis

Here's a pic of the R9 Fury X that /u/TaintedSquirrel posted to reddit
The card has a total of 11 phases and sports 2 voltage controllers. One of them is most likely to be the IR 3567B that was on the R9 290X. Here it seems to be in a 6+1 configuration with 1 phase feeding the HBM and the 6 phases feeding the core. I have no idea what the other one is.
The card uses 0 polymer/electrolytic capacitors and only uses Tantalum caps due to space constraints however they will also increase the reliability and life span of the card. All the caps in the picture are input capacitors and smooth the incoming 12V the output caps are most likely all located on the back of the PCB of which there are no photos until the 24th of July.
The MOSFETs in use seem to be the same 70A beast that the 290X has so assuming you have good cooling on the VRM power and current limits are not going to be an issue because this VRM should be 420A capable.
As for cooling mods the core might not be compatible with most coolers due to the HBM stacks and may need an adapter. However if the HBM stacks are level with the core then strapping a CLC to this card should not be a problem. The bad news is that anyone using a universal water block will need a mounting adapter of some kind because the cooler mounting holes around the core are much further apart than on any past GPUs. Considering that the card comes stock with water cooling this isn't much of an issue in my opinion.

Thank you to Coolermaster for providing the V1000 that now powers this blog.